Vehicle Vibration Signal Processing for Road Surface Monitoring

Abstract

In India, road transportation dominates all other means of transportation mechanisms. Well maintained roadways make the travel smooth and comfortable for the passengers. Most of the time road irregularities, such as potholes and humps create disturbances to cozy travel and cause major damages to vehicles. Detecting road potholes and road roughness levels is a key to road condition monitoring, which impacts on transport safety and driving comfort. This paper proposes a method that aims to monitor road surfaces, detect road potholes and humps, and predict their severity by analyzing the vertical vibration signals produced by the vehicle while it moves. The proposed system uses the smartphone accelerometer to capture the vehicle vibrations in which $z$ -axis reading corresponds to the vehicle vertical vibrations. Gaussian model-based mining algorithm is proposed for the abnormal event detection, $x$ - $z$ ratio filtering is applied for event classification as pothole or hump. Severity estimation algorithm is proposed, which makes use of the relation between vertical acceleration and relative vertical displacement of the vehicle.